e poor of Judaea now flourishes among the rich. Its
acceptance is self-deception, if not a lie, and as hypocritical
Christianity contrasts sharply with the old Adam, who will crop out,
these people lay themselves open to unsparing ridicule.--In the streets
of Berlin I saw former daughters of Israel wear crosses about their
necks longer than their noses, reaching to their very waists. They
carried evangelical prayer books, and were discussing the magnificent
sermon just heard at Trinity church. One asked the other where she had
gone to communion, and all the while their breath smelt. Still more
disgusting was the sight of dirty, bearded, malodorous Polish Jews,
hailing from Polish sewers, saved for heaven by the Berlin Society for
the Conversion of Jews, and in turn preaching Christianity in their
slovenly jargon. Such Polish vermin should certainly be baptized with
cologne instead of ordinary water."

This is to be taken as an expression of Heine's own feelings, which come
out plainly, when, "persistently loyal to Jewish customs," he eats,
"with good appetite, yes, with enthusiasm, with devotion, with
conviction," _Shalet_, the famous Jewish dish, about which he says:
"This dish is delicious, and it is a subject for painful regret that
the Church, indebted to Judaism for so much that is good, has failed to
introduce _Shalet_. This should be her object in the future. If ever she
falls on evil times, if ever her most sacred symbols lose their virtue,
then the Church will resort to _Shalet_, and the faithless peoples will
crowd into her arms with renewed appetite. At all events the Jews will
then join the Church from conviction, for it is clear that it is only
_Shalet_ that keeps them in the old covenant. Boerne assures me that
renegades who have accepted the new dispensation feel a sort of
home-sickness for the synagogue when they but smell _Shalet_, so that
_Shalet_ may be called the Jewish _ranz des vaches_."

Heine forgot that in another place he had uttered this witticism in his
own name. He long continued to take peculiar pleasure in his dogmatic
division of humanity into two classes, the lean and the fat, or rather,
the class that continually gets thinner, and the class which, beginning
with modest dimensions, gradually attains to corpulency. Only too soon
the poet was made to understand the radical falseness of his definition.
A cold February morning of 1848 brought him a realizing sense of his
fatal mistake. Sick